Welcome back, Founders & Operators. In this week’s update: Upcoming Events, a New B2B Intro Marketplace, and our Tutorial on Building Live Trading Agents with AI.
UPCOMING NYC EVENTS FOR FOUNDERS & OPERATORS
Breakfast Club · Thursday, August 6 · 8:30-10:30 AM · West Village
Coffee, croissants, matcha, and co-working at an iconic café on Bleecker Street. Limited spots.
Build Session · Friday, August 7 · 1:30-5:30 PM · Harvard Club of New York
An afternoon of focused work, peer feedback, unlimited tea and coffee, and a guided tour of the historic clubhouse.
Claude & Coffee · Tuesday, August 11 · 5:00-8:00 PM · Georgie’s, LES
More co-working, this time with Claude. Bring something you want to build, refine, or finally ship. We’re making August the month of focus & execution.
Rooftop Drinks · Thursday, August 13 · 6:30-8:00 PM · Lower East Side
A break from the co-working sessions. Join founders and operators for rooftop drinks and conversations on GTM, AI, infrastructure, and what everyone' is building.
NEW APPROACHES TO GTM: MEET ATRIOS, THE NYC-BASED MARKETPLACE FOR WARM B2B INTROS
The effectiveness of cold outbound is at generational lows. Email open rates sit in the single digits, LinkedIn InMail has been spammed into uselessness, and executive ICPs are now the hardest audiences on the internet to reach. The industry's response has been more automation, more data, more sequencing. All of it built on an assumption that attention is free and outreach volume can compensate for quality.
The more interesting and promising work is happening at the incentive layer. The next generation of GTM redesigns the economics between vendor, connector, and buyer: marketplaces that pay both sides to have a conversation, community-led distribution where trusted operators route deals and share in the upside, and agentic sourcing that finds the shortest trusted path to a target.
Why now: LLMs are cheap enough to do granular ICP matching at scale, and a decade of consumer marketplaces has proven that double-sided incentives with fast payment rails work. One innovative new company in this space is Atrios, an NYC startup out of a16z Speedrun.
Their model: companies define their ICP. Atrios matches it against the networks of 1,000+ Tastemakers: founders, operators, and community builders whose audiences already trust them. Tastemakers route warm intros to potential buyers into AE calendars; Atrios pays the connector and also compensates the person being introduced. Most prior GTM primitives asked one side to subsidize the others. This one prices in all three. The company reports 20x reply rates versus cold outbound and roughly $1M ARR within four months, with buyers including Brex, Deel, and Rho. While these are company numbers, the direction matches what I see in my work: the best deals are warm-routed, never cold.
One takeaway If you’re building: Audit your pipeline honestly. A collapsing reply rate is structural, not a tooling problem. Map the top five people in your network who already have trusted access to your ICP, and align incentives with them before buying another sequencing tool. Attention is a scarce resource. Warm intros, advisors and evangelists will help you cut through the noise.
RETURN OF THE QUANTS: HOW TO BUILD LIVE TRADING AGENTS WITH AI
I'm excited to open source my talk on Building Live Trading Agents. In this recent session with our friends from The AI Collective we explored how to use - and how not to use - LLMs to build robust trading systems for equities. This is a practical tutorial, so we cover the tech stack, data sourcing, signal generation, and fundamentals of risk management. Take a look at the deck here.
See you soon,
Stephan